Centre for Economic and Social History François Simiand

EURETES “History of Capitalism” project is rooted in the collaborations between specialists in economic history at the Centre François Simiand (EHESS/Paris School of Economics - PSE), the Institut d’histoire économique Paul Bairoch (University of Geneva) and the Instituto ‘Figuerola’ de Historia y Ciencias Sociales (Carlos III University, Madrid). Its aim is to conduct a joint, multidisciplinary study of economic history and of the development of capitalism from an international perspective.

The Lubartworld project combines a transnational history perspective with a microhistorical methodology by reconstructing the individual trajectories of each and ever Jewish inhabitant from the Polish village of Lubartów between the early 1920s and the early 1950s, whether they emigrated or stayed behind, and whether they were exterminated or survived the Holocaust.

This project explores how countries have held official foreign exchange reserves since the late 19th century and the implications for the current international monetary system. We construct an original dataset that provides for the first time in the long run the distinction between reserves held as foreign deposits and reserves held as purchased foreign securities. We then investigate the political and economic determinants of these two types of foreign reserve holdings, including testing the hypothesis that foreign deposits are less associated with financial openness and a market-based foreign reserve accumulation process. This research has broad implications for understanding how the international monetary system will evolve differently depending on whether foreign reserve holdings are based on market-based financial choices or on factors rooted in bilateral economic and political relations.

The Discussion Group targets a broad audience: young scholars in the social sciences (not only Economics, but also Sociology, History, Political Science, Anthropology, Philosophy, etc., who usually finish their undergraduate and PhD degrees after very little contact with Classical Political Economy), as well as those from the natural sciences with an interest in the development of economic ideas and their philosophical roots. The meetings are not about a chronological description of doctrines, anchored in the past, as canonically presented in the textbooks on the history of economic thought. On the contrary, they seek to contribute to our understanding of contemporary capitalism, for which, we propose, it is necessary to study the historical development of central economic concepts. We argue that only the continuation of the living yet dormant Political Economy project offers the keys to understand the challenges of our historical present, where the main conflict is who plans whom.

This workshop “History and Social Sciences: debates in Economic History”, follows the organization of its previous editions in 2016, 2018 and 2021. It is aimed at PhD students and young researchers and intends to create a space for discussion and deepening of some of the main approaches in economic history. It is interdisciplinary in nature and aims to address the diversity of current debates–and to reflect the profound renewal in this field–in the context of the relationship between history and social sciences.

EURHISFIRM will design a world-class research infrastructure (RI) to connect, collect, collate, align, and share detailed, reliable, and standardized long-term company-level data for Europe to enable researchers, policymakers and other stakeholders to analyze, develop, and evaluate effective strategies to promote investment and economic growth. To achieve this goal, EURHISFIRM develops innovative tools to spark a “big data revolution” in the historical social sciences and to open access to cultural heritage in close cooperation with existing RIs.

The 3000 families survey was launched in the early 1980s. It is based on the systematic reconstitution of the trajectories and the descendants of all individuals whose last name begins with the letters "TRA".

The DFIH database collects data on firms and securities prices listed on the Paris stock exchange from 1795 to 1976.

This project first aims at building a new political economy of colonialism in the 19th and 20th centuries. It will be grounded in the study of the French case yet with other colonial empires in mind. Our research hypothesis is here that colonialism was mainly beneficial to a minority of politically and economically influential actors, in metropolitan or local societies. The longevity of colonialism could be explained by the political and economic success of pro-colonial coalitions in the metropolis, the so-called colonial lobbies, which also included a few cooperative agents from the colonized societies. Given that colonialism was a global phenomenon, its understanding requires considering the ‘wider plan’ rather than focusing on a single colonized region. Last, previous analyses of colonialism have not given attention to the role and agency of the colonized, if only the autochthonous elites, however constrained and limited their space of action was.

The Socface project brings together archivists, demographers, economists, historians, and computer scientists to develop technologies for the large-scale processing of huge series of historical documents. Based on automated handwriting recognition, the project aims at analyzing all nominal census lists from 1836 to 1936 (20 censuses)

Le Laboratoire sur les Inégalités Mondiales (World Inequality Lab) a pour but de promouvoir la recherche portant sur la dynamique de la répartition des revenus et des patrimoines au niveau mondial, aussi bien entre pays et à l’intérieur des pays. Sa mission principale est de mettre à jour et d’élargir la World Inequality Database. Il a également pour rôle d’élaborer des rapports et des documents de travail relatifs aux inégalités abordant des problématiques de fond et de méthodologie.